Martian Ethnography and the Queer Reading of Tars Tarkas
A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Greetings and salutations! In this issue of the Official William Emmons Books Newsletter, we’ll be taking a look at the classic science fiction adventure novel A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs.
I’m intimidated to have opinions about this novel because Burroughs stands in a class by himself as the quintessential early 20th century American adventure writer. But, like the red and green men of Mars, I have to approach this novel with the bravery to stand by my hot takes.
As the subject line of this post implies, one of my hot takes is that we can and ought to do a queer reading of Tars Tarkas, one of the most popular and traditionally masculine supporting characters in the Burroughs canon. I’ll admit this is provocative but my two-fold goal with this review is one I hope my fellow Burroughs fanatics can sympathize with. The ends I am trying to achieve are (1) to show that Burroughs is fecund and useful for thinking about things and (2) to encourage people to pick up Burroughs who likely wouldn’t otherwise.
My readership is divided into at least two camps with regard to this novel. There’s going to be a fraction of you who are already very familiar with A Princess of Mars and read Burroughs’ whole oeuvre during adolescence. There’s also going to be a bigger fraction who are fairly unfamiliar with Burroughs and his works. For the sake of the latter, I am going to lay out the basics of this book before trying to analyze it.
The novel was first serialized under the title Under the Moons of Mars as by the pseudonym Norman Bean in The All-Story over six issues dated between February and July 1912, the first installment of which can be perused here. It was re-edited and released as a hardcover in 1917 under its current title and this is more-or-less the text that comes down to us today. This was a reread for me. This time, I took it in as the 2012 Tantor Audio movie tie-in audiobook titled John Carter in A Princess of Mars narrated by Scott Brick. A Princess of Mars is the first of Burroughs’ Barsoom series; Barsoom being the word for Mars in the the global Martian language.
Who is John Carter?
The novel’s protagonist is John Carter, a seemingly immortal gentleman of antebellum Virginia who remembers no childhood and as long as he can remember has always appeared to be about 30. As the story opens, he is a penny-less Confederate veteran and former Indian fighter turned prospector in the Arizona desert.
He and his partner strike on a rich vein but before his partner can return to civilization for proper equipment and men to work the mine, Apaches set upon him and kill him. John Carter rescues the body and is chased through the desert by the Apaches until he finds himself holed up in a remote mountain cave.
For unknown reasons, he enters into a state like a sort of waking sleep paralysis as menacing noises sound from the cave’s depths. Through an extreme effort of will he projects himself into an identical, naked, and equally physical astral body and leaves his old corpse-like body behind in the cave. Starring up into the sky, the naked astral John Carter sees Mars, a planet he strongly identifies with as a career fighting man. He feels himself pulled through the cold void of space and awakens in a patch of yellow moss on Mars.
Dances With Tharks
From there John Carter is captured by and lives among the nomadic and deeply warlike green men of the nation of Tharks. These non-mammalian, oviparous men and women inhabit the dead sea bottoms, making camp in the ruined cities. They are between 12 and 15 feet tall and have four arms, tusks, and big eyes that can move independently and see forwards and backwards.
John Carter impresses the Tharks because his muscles are very strong from having been developed under heavier Earthly gravitation. As a result, he can leap great distances and more jarringly kill Thark antagonists with a single punch. He technically gains status as a Thark chieftain by accidentally killing a couple guys this way.
The most science fictional aspect of the novel is John Carter serving as a sort of amateur ethnographer of Thark society. When he first comes upon the Tharks it is to one of their great clandestine incubators in the Martian desert. Their young are just hatching and he sees first hand how they are gathered up and cared for randomly with no regard to parentage.
Indeed, it is impossible among the green men to know who one’s parents are. Sexual pairings are made without sentiment in a system John Carter describes as being akin to how Kentucky racing stallions are bred. There’s only a hint as to whether the green men might enjoy sex but that’s for a later part of this review.
The Tharks are small-c communists full stop. What little personal property the men of the community may acquire is subject to being redistributed if the others in the community need it.
Their communism and warlike culture pairs with what John Carter describes as a cultural laziness. The Tharks have no industriousness, unwilling to do the work that would pull them from barbarism to civilization and unwilling to make anything that they can steal from someone else.
There is a gendered division of labor. The men are fighters and the women are cookers and makers—though not without martial training. Despite the martial prowess of the women, there is a taboo among the green men against a man killing a woman and vice versa.
The men, especially those of rank, are responsible for retinues of women and children who are not their wives and children. There’s a funny scene where after John Carter ends up with something of a retinue he tells the mighty warrior Tars Tarkas that he doesn’t need the service of the women—well, except for preparing his food and for mending what passes for clothes among Martians and for making his ammunition and and and…
John Carter’s assessment of Thark society is that on one hand they are noble and just and on the other they are cruel and loveless. What passes for humor among the green men is torture and people getting hurt in fights. The concept of friendship is alien to them. John Carter roots all this in the absence of mother love. The word be uses describe the green men’s system of child-rearing is “unnatural.”
In smaller and then bigger ways, John Carter shows the Tharks that cruelty and lovelessness don’t pay. He’s immediately better with Martian animals than his captors because he’s nice to them. He later allies with elements latent in their society to revolutionize Martian geopolitics and perhaps Thark culture. On the one hand, one can view this as a bog standard white savior narrative. After all, the Tharks prove basically pliable to working for John Carter to meet his goals. On the other hand, Thark society is shown to be a dynamic social organism with subversive elements that has the potential to change over time. More on this in a bit.
Romance For Men
I forget where I first heard the idea that Burroughs was a romance writer for men. It’s oft repeated in my circles. While he has had his feminine devotees over the years—Jane Goodall and Leigh Brackett stand out—this is basically correct. And here we can take romance to mean both the antiquated meaning, as in an adventure, and the meaning still in circulation, as in a love story.
The characteristics of a romance for men of the Burroughs school include: (1) the viewpoint character is a man; (2) the object of romantic longing is a heterosexual one, i.e., a woman; (3) the man and woman love each other at almost first site but propriety and differences in culture keep them at bay (ape vs. human, Earthly vs. Martian, etc.); (4) the romance is also impeded by the man’s shyness with regard to women; (5) both the man and woman are highly valorous and ethical individuals; and (6) the man’s fighting prowess is or borders on superhuman. In the person of John Carter, the concomitant to (6) is that his attraction to warfare borders on antisocial. In the person of Tarzan, it’s an overly developed sense of humor that borders on antisocial. And for the counterexample see Pirates of Venus.
This novel’s main thrusts outside of detailing outré environs and Martian anthropology, are the martial adventures of John Carter and his romance with the titular character, a red Martian woman named Dejah Thoris who is the granddaughter of the king or jeddak of the city-state of Helium. The romance is frustrated at every turn by circumstance and by John Carter’s lack of understanding of the subtleties of red Martian culture.
Dejah Thoris falls into the hands of the Tharks when her scientific airship expedition is shot down by the powerful and accurate radium rifles of the green men. She is the only survivor and kept alive solely to be brought before the Thark jeddak Tal Hajus and tortured to death for the amusement of the assembled Thark nation.
Naturally John Carter commits himself to saving her from this and, if I’m parsing the text correctly, a promised rape at the hands of Lorquas Ptomel, chieftain or jed of the band of Tharks the pair has been captured by. The text is euphemistic about the latter, using the phrase “a fate worse than death.”
I won’t get into the details of their escape and how they’re separated and reunited again. It’s a whole thing and leads into the part of the novel that John Carter spends in disguise as a red man of the city-state of Zodanga which to my reading is less interesting than the time with the Tharks.
Every action John Carter takes throughout the novel is driven by a desire to protect and be with Dejah Thoris. And he performs a lot of deeds both of derring-do and diplomacy to win her. But to me, this is less interesting than the backdrop of Thark society present for the majority of the novel.
The Queer Reading of Tars Tarkas
John Carter’s main interlocutor among the Tharks is a green woman named Sola, who is different from other Tharks in that she is a kind person. Fortuitously, Sola is given John Carter as a charge when he first enters the band and she educates him in Martian ways and language.
Later, under John Carter’s orders as a chieftain among the Tharks, Sola succors Dejah Thoris and keeps her out the hands of more traditionally neglectful and malicious green women. Sola is well suited for this because she is sympathetic to Dejah Thoris
Indeed, Sola goes as far as to conspire with John Carter about his and Dejah Thoris’ escape and then actually accompanies them when they go. Why do her values go against the grain of the Thark mainstream?
It’s because she’s a lovechild, the product of a forbidden union and a heterodox childhood. Against social custom, Sola’s mother Gozava fell in love with a Thark warrior and the two mated in secret. They incubated their egg by itself in the desolate hills and when it hatched, Gozava hid Sola and gave her mother love. In her early days, Sola learned to embrace sentiments other green Martians lack or are culturally cut off from.
One night while her father was away fighting for the nation, Sola and her mother were found out. Gozava managed to secret Sola in among the other anonymous young before being dragged before Tal Hajus and tortured to death for her deviant behavior. One of Gozava’s last acts was to whisper to Sola the name of her father—a name she never revealed to her torturers. The name was Tars Tarkas.
As stated, Tars Tarkas is a relatively prominent Burroughs character. This year at PulpFest, I tried to buy a t-shirt with him on it but Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc., was out of my size. In the novel under review, he’s the greatest warrior among the Tharks and second-in-command of the band of Tharks that captures John Carter.
Sola reveals her parentage to John Carter, which is unknown to any other living person including Tars Tarkas. She does this so that John Carter may know that her father has a secret vendetta against the Thark jeddak Tal Hajus and so that he may have information useful to enlisting her father as an ally at a later time. This time does come and in the sequence that follows Tars Tarkas goes from warrior mensch to warrior-statesman ubermensch in a very short period.
All this is well and good, but what this have to do with a queer reading of Tars Tarkas? His relationship with Gozava is obviously heterosexual. In context, this doesn’t stop us from reading it as queer. First, in the sense that the relationship is odd and strange in the context of officially aromantic Thark society. Second, in the sense that it is outside the established sexual norms of Thark society. Breeding here is done for love and perhaps pleasure rather than eugenics. The Thark monarchy under Tal Hajus suppresses this sort of relationship through murder and torture.
Queerness is pregnant with the potential for alternative values as it can, like science fiction, stand outside and against the mainstream of society. Tars Tarkas’ experience as a bereaved queer lover and parent makes him more open to John Carter’s appeal to the—among the Tharks—countercultural value of friendship. United by Tars Tarkas’ secret, the pair overthrow Tal Hajus in a lawful coup and install Tars Tarkas as jeddak of the Tharks. The alliance that follows, between the Tharks and the red men of Helium, changes the politics of Mars.
Moreover, Tars Tarkas openly acknowledges Sola as his daughter before all his jeds. No jed challenges Tars Tarkas for the throne over this queer and heretofore forbidden form of kinship, but Burroughs does not detail the full social consequences of the ascendancy of a countercultural jeddak. Still, there are hints. In a speech to the jeddak of Helium, Tars Tarkas explains that John Carter has made his people understand new values of love, friendship, and kindness. Perhaps Tars Tarkas, a skilled diplomat, overly credits John Carter. These values seem to be already latent in Tars Tarkas’ union with Gozava and the product of that union Sola.
Isn’t it too much to apply this 2024 concept of queerness to a novel written in 1912? Absolutely not. We always read literature in two contexts simultaneously. One is as an artifact of its time. The second is as a tool for interpreting our relationship to our times.
Conclusion
This novel is a captivating read though has a stronger beginning and middle than ending. It’s the Tharks that make the novel and I’d recommend it to any reader of classic science fiction on that basis. The novel is also particularly important as a Burroughs novel and as a work of science fantasy.
By my current estimate, I’ve read 24 books by Burroughs during adulthood—26 if you count The Moon Maid as three separate books. This is the first time I’ve done a reread of one of those and the first time I’ve touched upon one of the truly early ones in more than decade. What struck me is that Burroughs really had something in the teens and that this one is stronger than some of the later novels I’ve read more recently. I’m not in love with it the same way I am with Tarzan of the Apes but it’s a good introduction to Burroughs all the same and I recommend it as an entry point.
For science fantasy this is a seminal work. If not patient zero for this kind of fiction, it’s certainly the vector by which it was most widely spread to the point where it became a common type of American science fiction up through the 1940s (with a revival in the 1970s). I read it in my early 20s in part because I wanted a sense of genre history. It’s a good one to have under your belt.
Support This Newsletter!
I’ve instituted a virtual tip jar in the form of a Buy Me A Coffee account. This allows you to remit a small one-time payment to me if you like what I am doing here.
As always, I’d appreciate it if you’d peruse my eBay store. I have a few pretty cool items listed right now, including the first appearance of the Foundation story The Mule in Astounding.
I also curate personalized bundles of vintage books and magazines based on your budget and interests. Some examples are in this post. Contact me if you are interested.
If you like this post, share it. Sharing is caring.